Right now, the technology for automated vehicles

is moving really fast.

But to actually integrate them into society,

there are a lot of considerations that humans

do subconsciously, intuitively.

We have to program vehicles to make these same kinds

of decisions in the same kinds of scenarios,

and it's really important to do so in an ethical, morally

responsible way.

Programmers are going to, ahead of time, decide how

these autonomous vehicles maneuver.

And human drivers often will violate traffic laws

in order to maintain vehicle safety and occupant comfort.

If you are programming an autonomous vehicle

and you encounter an obstacle in the middle of your lane,

what do you do?

Because a human driver would go around the obstacle and violate

the double yellow line, assuming that it's clear.

But do we program the autonomous vehicle

to actually ahead of time decide to break the law?

We can treat that as a very harsh, strict constraint,

and the vehicle will have to come to a complete stop

in order to not hit the obstacle.

Another option would be to minimize how much it violates

the double yellow line and veer very closely

to the obstacle, very uncomfortable

for the occupants in the passenger seat.

The third scenario is to enter the oncoming traffic

lane to give more space to the obstacle

as you maneuver around it.

The car itself is moving based on algorithms.

And these algorithms that we use have different constraints as

well as costs.

And we tune them to tell it how far

away to be from an obstacle, how close to get to an obstacle.

The car itself doesn't care.

In a way, we can translate human comfort, human safety

into these numerical constraints and costs.

The vehicles are going to be what's

making the decisions now, and so we need to somehow translate

social behavior, ethical behavior into what

happens once the vehicle finally takes full control.

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